Stanley Cavell's American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies (review)

Lawrence Rhu's Stanley's Cavell's American Dream presents itself as an act of metacriticism which aims to evaluate the contributions the Harvard philosopher has made to the study of Shakespeare and Hollywood films. Rhu writes that his "interest in Cavell's work has always centered upon moments of convergence where traditionally disparate elements—such as Shakespeare, film, and Transcendentalism—come together and illuminate one another in Cavell's thought" (3). One challenge Rhu faces, however, is that the relationship between Shakespeare's plays and Hollywood films is not in itself central to Cavell's writings: Cavell is interested in Shakespeare and he is interested in film, but he is only occasionally interested in Shakespeare and film. Cavell has convincingly shown that what he terms the "comedy of remarriage" (27) can be related, structurally and thematically, to Shakespeare's romantic comedies (especially as read through Northrop Frye) and to the so-called romances, especially The Winter's Tale, but much of the time he writes of Shakespeare and film without bringing the two together except in the most casual and superficial of ways.

Rhu, for his part, strives to bring all of Cavell into some kind of coherence, to the extent that he will drop a discussion of the opening musical number from The Band Wagon into the middle of a chapter entitled "Cavell's Rome," with the slim excuse that Cavell, on separate occasions, has commented on the Fred Astaire film and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Not only does Rhu make little attempt to relate these texts within Cavell's work, but he only gestures at bringing them together within the argument he is constructing. Indeed, Rhu gives the impression, throughout Stanley Cavell's American Dream, that texts can be cited more or less arbitrarily as evidence for this or that point. So, for instance, an elucidation of Philip Larkin's poetic revision of Philip Sidney drops into the middle of chapter 3 with only the slightest of justification. At times, Rhu's desire to tie a variety of texts into some sort of intertextual knot can be dizzying: in the course of two paragraphs, for example, we migrate from New Yorker film critic David Denby to Cavell to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer to Cavell to J. L. Austin to Harold Bloom to Erik Erikson. As a consequence of these strategies, Stanley Cavell's American Dream can perhaps best be considered a meditation on Cavell, philosophy, Shakespeare, and Hollywood, each "topic" engaged pretty much at random, with connections among them picked up and dropped at will, while other issues frequently intersect at various points throughout.

As Rhu acknowledges more than once, Cavell's philosophical writings on Shakespeare and film have not been central to the critical discourses surrounding these subjects. Film critics and theorists, in particular, have looked askance at Cavell's seemingly innocent engagements with such much-studied genres as screwball comedies and the woman's film (in, respectively, Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears). But Shakespeareans, too, have found Cavell's essays on King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and other plays to exist in a kind of critical and theoretical vacuum, written as if the plays were being newly discovered at the moment of Cavell's writing: one critic described Cavell's "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear" as the essay from outer space (5). To be fair, as Rhu also points out, Cavell's writings on Shakespeare, in spite of "their occasional failure to observe professional protocols that characterize scholarly conduct of argument" (6), have recently been acknowledged with enthusiasm by some critics and scholars, although Rhu somewhat overstates the case for Cavell's importance. Stephen Orgel, for example, in his lengthy introduction to the Oxford edition of The Winter's Tale, cites Cavell's essay on that play—admittedly, with high praise ("a superb essay")—three times in the course of a brief discussion...